Sample Resumes?

First of all, my compliments on the book. I just finished it and although not in the job market currently it definitely gave me a lot to work on to be prepared when that does occur. I especially loved the portfolio idea. Having been on both sides of the interview table, I can definitely see how that would be HUGE.

I had a question for you. Do you have posted anywhere any sample resumes? You give a good outline of things to do, but for me, it helps to see a final product. Any help you can provide is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad you liked the book. The portfolio is one of those ideas that seems so simple and obvious, isn’t it? And yet, it never occurred to me until I’d seen it done years ago, too.

I thought a lot about putting in sample resumes, and I decided not to mostly for philosophical reasons. I didn’t want readers to focus on presentation, and instead to put their energy into the words. That’s why there are bits and snippets of resume sections used as illustrations, but not a single cohesive “this is what a resume should look like.” That’s because there’s not a single right way to do it.

You can see my own resume as an example of how I like resumes. Don’t worry about the formatting as much as the key points of putting the most important information at the top, and go to less important as you move down the list.

Thanks for the link to your HTML resume (though the hyperlink isn’t quite right). A doc/pdf version might be nice too (we don’t want much :) While reading the resume chapters, I also thought it would be helpful to see a sample resume.

There are many resources out there for sample resumes to check for formatting, both online and in different books. I chose not to include sample resumes in the book because I didn’t want readers to focus on the formatting, but rather on the content, the words, the stories that you tell in the resume to make the reader interested. I’ve found that when presented with a sample resume, people tend to take out the sample information, plug in their own, and leave it at that. (For more about this, see my blog post Resume-building websites are worse than worthless.)

The sample sections and bullets that I put in the book are to help inspire the words and stories that you want to tell, but I don’t want you to follow too closely. They’re there for inspiration, not emulation.

Once you get the words and ideas together on what you want to say, you can pick up any source of sample resumes to follow the formatting guidelines presented there. Your public library will have dozens.